Trump Strips Hunter and Ashley Biden’s Secret Service Protection Early. His Own Kids Got a $1.7M Extension in 2021

President Donald Trump is ending the Secret Service protection for former President Joe Biden’s children, Hunter Biden and Ashley Biden, early.

In a Truth Social post on Monday, March 17, Trump, 78, called it “ridiculous” that Hunter, 55, had allegedly as “many as 18” Secret Service agents on his detail. “Please be advised that, effective immediately, Hunter Biden will no longer receive Secret Service protection,” Trump wrote after mentioning Hunter’s recent trip to South Africa. 

“He is currently vacationing in, of all places, South Africa, where the Human Rights of people has been strenuously questioned. Because of this, South Africa has been taken off our list of Countries receiving Economic and Financial Assistance,” the president wrote, referring to an executive order he signed last month to cut assistance to South Africa due to the country’s Expropriation Act. 

(The Expropriation Act was signed into law last month and was meant to address actions taken during South Africa’s racist apartheid era, reports the Associated Press. It grants the government the power to take lands in some instances that are not being used or in cases where it would help the public if redistributed. The White House claims the law “blatantly discriminates against ethnic minority Afrikaners.”)

Trump also announced that Biden's daughter Ashley, 43, “who has 13 agents will be taken off the list.”

At the end of Trump’s first term in office, he extended Secret Service protection for his children for six months after he left the White House. In September 2021, the Washington Post reported that protection for Trump’s four adult children cost taxpayers approximately $1.7 million, citing spending documents. 

The Post reported that other non-Trump family members, including former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien were also granted extended protection.

Earlier on Monday, Trump also took aim at Biden’s preemptive pardons of political figures who have spoken out against him, including members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, members of the Capitol and D.C. police forces who testified before the committee, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Trump “declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” he wrote on Truth Social, although the Constitution has no framework for a future president to undo their predecessors' pardons.

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In December 2024, Biden pardoned his son Hunter in his illegal gun possession and tax charge cases.